Tim Grobaty: What if technology got put before the horse?

REVERSE ENGINEERING: More people buy books online, whether it's the analog, doorstop version or in the handy Kindle/Nook e-book form, than they do in bookstores, which are dwindling as quickly as the old farrier shops that used to dot Pine Avenue before the automobile, or e-horse, was invented.

And the phone, as it's still quaintly called, is now used more for texting than for person-to-person talking.

We buy all our clothes online now. We just bought another guitar on eBay, we purchased a 72-pack pack of batteries on Woot!, we get our razor blades delivered to our house monthly by DollarShaveClub.com.

We were having one of our little epiphanies the other day, while using our phone for what we can't remember - flipping through Flipboard, building a tune on GarageBand, dropping a boulder on someone with Action Movie.

And our little scenario was this: What if technology had been invented backward?

Not everything, of course. Electricity still would have to come fairly early. Obviously, we haven't thought all this stuff through. It's science fiction, OK? It just happens. It's a laboratory experiment that goes horribly wrong, if that makes it easier for you to accept.

The point is, the smart phone and the Internet are invented before, say, stores. And before regular telephones that you can talk on.

The ability to buy everything online had been around since your great-grandparents sat around the iPad and watched FDR give his fireside chats on Skype.

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, a couple of Stanford dropouts are tinkering around in their garage and they invent a store. It's not a huge store, just a little drygoods place where you can get a cowboy hat, a few bolts of fabric and a can of corn.

It's met with skepticism. It'll never catch on. Naysayers scoff, "Bah!" they say (because they're scoffers). "Do I really need to go through all the hassle of strapping on a jet pack just to go out for six yards of gingham and some lima beans? I can get that with a quick trip to Clothandbeans.com.

A handful of geeks and nerds, however, take to it. "Look," a geek would say to an enthusiastic nerd. "I needed some black cotton to patch up my Darth Vader costume for tonight's convention and I got it immediately at The Store.notcom!"

To which the nerd would reply, "I'm hungry right now. I'm going to go get some chickpeas!"

"I don't know if they carry chickpeas," the geek says. "Are they legumes?"

The nerd checks Wikipedia, which has been around for 60 years. Yes, it turns out, chickpeas (Cicer arietinum) are a legume of the family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae.

As stores begin expanding their inventory, the public begins to accept the idea more and more. Rather than just scroll through various dot-com inventories, they can waltz down rows and rows of merchandise, pawing the luxurious silks and satins, getting free samples at the Costco, the giant box store established by the venerable corporation Apple (est. 1907).

Stores become analog versions of Amazon.com, with physical shopping carts that customers load up with cameras, tires, garden hoses, groceries and box springs. No shipping! Immediate procurement! See what you're buying!

Meanwhile, in a Verizon lab, engineers are starting to develop a new Android phone with voice capability. At this point, people are using the phone for terse messages. Giggles are digitized as LOL, gales of laughter are abbreviated as LMAO, and eruptions of guffaws are rendered as LMFABBQROF!!!

Two Verizon engineers develop an app. They try it out: "Watson, come here. I need you" hollers one engineer into his Android. It initially scares the hell out of Watson, who runs out of the lab and seeks asylum in a local cathedral.

People begin downloading the 99-cent app (there's a free version, but it's riddled with advertisements that break into conversation with Netflix offers and Angry Birds updates), and talking out loud to one another over vast distances.

"What time's that thing tonight?"

"8:30."

"What should I wear?"

"Your Darth Vader costume that you fixed. And a cowboy hat."

"Can I bring anything?"

"We need beans."

"OK, LOL."

"Why did you say `LOL'?"

"I thought the `bean' reference was funny."

"Well, if it's funny, laugh. Don't say `LOL."'

And that all took about 10 seconds. No typing tiny keys with your hamlike thumbs.

Pretty soon, "talking" would surpass "texting" in usage. People trying to buy things from Amazon would start getting the message "Error 404: Not Found. Try Going to a Store."